How to become a Salesforce Consultant
We’re finally on my favourite role article (yes I’m biassed!) 😄 Being a Salesforce Consultant myself (and so is Kelly), I can’t wait to take you through the steps needed to become a Salesforce Consultant!
According to Trailhead, Salesforce Consultants have a 9% annual growth rate and there have been 37,000 new jobs advertised in the last 12 months alone! So i’ll let you imagine what a great career path this can potentially be for you 😉.
Do you have great communication skills? Are you organised and eager to learn? Do you love problem solving? Then this might be the tech role for you, so make sure you keep reading!
Salesforce is still a niche market to get into, which means the skills these individuals have are highly sought after, and therefore their salaries are also usually very good. Is it easy? Of course not, but usually nothing worth trying for is easy 😉.
If you take the practical steps i’m going to advise you on in this article, then you will make things easier for yourself!
If you haven’t already read our How to become a Business Analyst or 5 things you need to know about a Scrum Master role then definitely check them out too, to help you decide which role you may want to get into in tech.
In this article, we’ll go through what Salesforce is, what a Salesforce Consultant is, skills required to become a Salesforce Consultant and steps you can take to get into this career path. Of course we’ll also mention average salaries, but I want to manage expectations around this; salaries for Salesforce Consultants vary widely between different companies.
What on earth is “Salesforce”?
According to Salesforce, “Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that brings customers & companies together. It is one integrated CRM that gives all your departments - including marketing, sales, commerce and service - a single, shared view of every customer.” This is a CRM tool in the cloud.
Ok, so I know that might sound confusing for some so let me give you an example. Imagine you are shopping on ASOS (or any e-commerce website), you add items to your cart and you check out. Once you’ve checked out you receive the confirmation and further updates about when your delivery is due, where the items are each step of the way right? So the system behind the front-end you see that makes all this work, may be a platform like Salesforce Commerce Cloud (or Salesforce itself for companies like NYX). Commerce cloud includes capabilities such as digital commerce, predictive intelligence (so those ads you see targeted at things you usually look at), point of sale and order management.
This is only one example to show you what Salesforce is capable of. Salesforce has many products such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Tableau Analytics and much more but their main aim is allowing the customer to have a 360 degree view of their customers. In our ASOS example, this will include details of who the customer is, past orders they made, current orders on the way, and logs of complaints they may have made etc so the individual looking at this will be able to get a full picture of what this customer may be like.
Ok I think I get it, so how does a Salesforce Consultant come into this?
A Salesforce Consultant is the individual who has good knowledge of Salesforce and will be helping the client get the most out of their Salesforce platform.
How do they do this?
Similar to a Business Analyst, they will gather the business requirements from a client and understand their business processes and pain points, as well as opportunities where Salesforce can help them. They will have the technical knowledge required to design and/or implement the proposed solution for the client to give them a streamlined process (this doesn’t mean you need code! Salesforce has the motto of “clicks not code” so if you know how to configure it, you will manage it, more on this further down).
Some of their responsibilities include:
Managing the client relationship
Supporting the team on technical requirements
Taking the organisation and their users through training to be able to use the platform
Gathering requirements
Creating & managing project plans
So you can see a Salesforce Consultant usually wears multiple hats to get the job done. They need Salesforce knowledge but also have great business analysis skills.
What skills do they need?
There are many skills a Salesforce Consultant needs to be successful but here are some of the main ones:
They will need to have great business analysis skills; a good Salesforce Consultant is one that can gather requirements well and challenge the client to really make them evaluate their processes. While doing this, they will also be able to map the business requirements to Salesforce features that could help solve their problems.
They’re great at empathising with others. As a Salesforce Consultant you need to be able to empathise with the client’s pain points and challenges to deliver a solution that will be highly valuable for them and increase their ROI.
They have great communication skills - to gather the requirements, showcase your proposed solution and manage expectations, you need to build a good rapport with your client which means you need great communication skills!
How much do they make?
You’ll be excited to know that Salesforce Consultants get paid very well ;) According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a Salesforce Consultant is £62,668. This is what you can potentially make within 2-3 years of working in the ecosystem. This does vary greatly between different companies, so you can speak to recruiters to find out the average starting salary of a junior consultant.
To give some context around pay increases, I started my career as a Junior Salesforce Consultant in 2017 (I was a Salesforce Admin in 2016) and from then till now as a Managing Consultant, I have had a 214% increase in my pay! However, I have worked extremely hard to get to this point, so you will need to do the same if you want to be successful in this career. You have to show your employer what a valuable asset you are to the business.
I’m loving the sound of it, so tell me how I can become a Salesforce Consultant?
For those of you reading this without a University degree, you’ll be very happy to know you DON’T need an IT degree (or any degree for that matter) to become a Salesforce Consultant. However, as more and more people are trying to get into this field, you need something to stand out from the crowd. So for this, I highly recommend taking the Salesforce Administrator certification exam.
To prepare for the exam you can complete modules on Trailhead, the best free learning tool for Salesforce. You can also take practice exams on Focus on Force (this is $19). If you don’t want to pay, there are many free practical exams online too but they may not be as trustworthy so do your due diligence on them.
This will show your potential employer that you have the foundation skills necessary to do the job. However, understanding the theory and actually putting it into practice are two very different things so make sure you complete the superbadges available in Trailhead (which is like mini projects) or look for volunteering opportunities where you can configure Salesforce for charities for example.
You’ve passed the exam but still can’t find a job?
Now let’s imagine you’ve taken the exam and passed it, this may not be enough on its own to land your first job as a Salesforce Consultant. So how do we make this more likely? NETWORK, NETWORK, NETWORK! The Salesforce Ecosystem is a small enough community that everyone tends to know each other in one way or another, so it’s crucial that you get your name out there, and as someone who has never worked in Salesforce before, the best way to do this is network with recruiters in the industry, as well as individuals you may know from different companies who use Salesforce. Take a look at our article on networking to make sure you nail this.
How do I update my CV to land my first Salesforce Consultant job?
So you’ve passed the exam, done your networking and now people know who you are in the ecosystem. You’ve just seen a job opening for a Junior Consultant role in a company you’re interested in and you want to apply. This is where a killer CV comes in - do you have the skills I mentioned above? Make sure you include examples of you showing this in your current or previous roles! Make sure you check our article on writing a killer CV to get the best tips on how to update your CV.
You can look into Apprenticeships
If you want to learn on the job, you can take a look at the LDN Apprenticeships Level 4 course which includes both working with a client and learning the skills needed to become a Salesforce Consultant.
You’ve got all the steps you need to get into this role, so what next?
If you want to become a Salesforce Consultant ensure you develop your soft skills and hard skills by taking the Salesforce Administrator certification. I’ve mentioned practical tips throughout the article that you can go through and make sure you implement on your CV to get that first interview and take the leap to becoming a Salesforce Consultant in tech
Remember, you don’t necessarily have to get into a Salesforce Consultancy to do this role; there are also many end users (organisations using Salesforce) looking for in-house Salesforce Consultants to support them on improving their current platform.
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